My political reaction comes from the following chain of thought:
* My country just did something I think is wrong.
* My country is led by people elected by a process that I generally trust but believe is under stress.
* The process or the people have failed and I want to stop this from happening by fixing the process so the people are replaced.
And, now I am stuck on how to do this. There a other actions I can take to help the people of Venezuela, but from a civics perspective, I believe it is my responsibility to partake in a discussion about the systemic failure that lead to this.
I think it is common for Americans to do this because we have a history of at least trying to fix our government because we usually believe we can.
Write to your representative and senators. It may seem impotent, but it what you as an American can to today. If you are concerned it is your duty to take the 10 minutes to write. If you do not then you are condoning these actions and the erosion of your rights.
How is that helpful? You either have a blue representative that already agrees with you, or a corrupt red one that most likely don't really listen to their constituents, or at least not the one that send mail.
Because that is how democracy works. I you don't exercise it will go away. Also there are Republican representatives who are on the record as being against the executive overreach. Getting feedback from their constituents will give them the support to push back. It really does work.
I believe you may have the causality backwards: ignoring constituents is probably not how democracy works, yet that is what we see today, therefore what we see today must not be democratic.
How can they get away with ignoring their constituents? Well: gerrymandering has made it so that representatives can select their constituents (and their opponent's constituents, or lack thereof). They will remain in their post indefinitely, regardless of this carefully-selected minority of constituents wants, so long as they continue to bend the knee and kiss the ring for you-know-who.
If an existing politician already lacks both the moral compunction and a self-interested political survial motivation to say a thing is bad, then a letter from a minority-opinioned constituent of theirs won't change their mind.
"Act of Congress" has always implied "something that is hard", but it has also implied "something that is fairly definitive". Today, congress can be largely ignored by the executive and congress seems to support it vocally. Is this also something that has been true more often than not in the American Republic?
And I wouldn't exactly say that Congress is wholly supporting unrestricted presidential power currently either. E.g. Senator Thune continually shooting down Trump's more oddball pleas.
There are very vocal supporters of the president in both the House and Senate GOP caucuses, but they're not the majority.
I think the strongest version of your argument would be something like 'In recent US Congressional history, both parties when in power have used congressional power to tactically check opposition party presidents, but neither have sought to permanently expand and defend the bounds of congressional power.'
Wouldn’t a functioning congress have resisted the executive aborbing its powers? After all, congress was supposed to be the most powerful branch. For good reason.
> congress was supposed to be the most powerful branch
Just re-read the USA constitution. Despite much effort, I did not find any "power rankings" of the three branches. Please point me in the right direction.
It was written before Dragonball Z existed so they didn't have the convenient framework of "power level" to use. Instead the power of Congress is indicated by the fact that all acts of the government are derived from bills originating in Congress, which the president rubber stamps (or not, which congress can then override), and the supreme court judicially interprets - but only if someone brings suit.
Now the president can do police actions and stuff but it seems like the intention was congress being the branch that had independent autonomy to just do things and get the ball rolling.
Congress sets the president's salary and has the power to fire him. The president has no such reverse power. The legislative branch is clearly the more powerful. "co-equal" is a fiction made up out of whole cloth by Nixon to further his criminal activities.
Until the party system existed, this was true. As soon as the party system evolved (pretty much immediately), with the President nominally the head of the party and the President has at least 1/3 of the Senate, the President comes near to immune from dismissal.
At that point, combined with the recent Supreme Court decisions holding 'official acts' as non-prosecutable, has swung the power meter severely to the executive.
Really? You read the constitution and managed to not absorb how the system is structured?
Hint: Look at who has which powers. Congress has the power to check every other branch. Neither the President nor the courts have symmetrical power over Congress. This asymmetry reflects its position.
I must admit I am a bit flabbergasted. How can you not understand what you read? And if a portion of Hacker News users, who are likely to have above average cognitive ability, don’t understand this, how poorly does the rest of the population understand the core ideas of how their political system works?
I'm not sure which Constitution you read but apparently it was a different one than the one I read.
Congress was not set up to be more powerful than the other branches. The president can veto laws that Congress tries to pass and the Supreme Court can also completely undo laws that Congress has passed.
My brain was largely trained using immense amounts of copyrighted material as well. Some of it I can even regurgitate almost exactly. I could list the names of many of the copyrighted works I have read/watched/listened to. I suppose my brain isn't open source, although I don't think it would currently be illegal to take a snapshot of my brain and publish it if the technology existed and open-source that. Granted, this would only be "reproducible" from source if you define the "source" as "my brain" rather than all of the material I consumed to make that snapshot.
> Some of it I can even regurgitate almost exactly
If you (or any human) violate copyright law, legal redress can be sought. The amount of damage you can do is limited because there's only one of you vs the marginal cost of duplicating AI instances.
There are many other differences between humans and AI in terms of capabilities and motivations to f the legal persons making decisions.
You may be right about the damage (will not dispute it even if I personally doubt it) - but what about the amount of good that it can do too? When deciding "what is to be done now" under uncertainty, we typically look at both sides of the ledger, the upsides in addition to the downsides.
Assume for a moment, that the current AI is teaching us that compute transforming data → information → knowledge → intelligence → agency → ... → AGI → ASI, is all there is to Intelligence-on-Tap? And imagine an AI path opens to AGI now and ASI later, where previously we didn't see any. Seems a bad deal to me, to frustrate, slow down, or even forego the 2050-s Intelligence Revolution that may multiply total human wealth by a factor of 10 to 20 in value, the way the Industrial Revolution did in the 1800-s. And we are to forego this, for what - so that we provide UBI to Disney shareholders? Every one of us is richer, better off now, than any king of old. Not too long ago, even the most powerful person in the lands could not prevent their 17 miscarriages/stillbirths/child_deaths failing to produce an heir to ascend the throne (a top priority that was, for sure for a king+queen). So in our imagined utopia, even the Disney shareholders are better off than they would be otherwise.
> Seems a bad deal to me, to frustrate, slow down, or even forego the 2050-s Intelligence Revolution that may multiply total human wealth by a factor of 10 to 20 in value...
Why do you assume the emergence of a super intelligence would result in human wealth increasing instead of decreasing? Looking at how humans with superior technology used it to exploit fellow humans throughout history should give you pause. Humans don't care about the aggregate "dog wealth" - let alone that of ants.
I'm assuming the Intelligence Revolution, multiplying Human Intelligence with machines, will have the same effect as the Industrial Revolution had, on multiplying human physical strength. That multiplied the GDP by a factor of ~20 times, hockey stick like, in a fairy short time, a century or two.
It will recombine the existing resources in new ways. Neanderthals had access to exactly the same natural resources as we have now. Obviously we do much more with what we both got, then they ever did. Obviously it's not only the availability of some atoms or molecules, but what one does with them, how one recombines them in novel ways. For that one needs knowledge and energy. And the later mostly turns out can be derived from the the former too.
Obviously it's what we do with them, the biotech manufacturing and nuclear power production revolution happened pre AI. The reason it hasn't replaced petroleum is economic and social.
The capabilities of a machine matter a lot under law. See current US gun legislation[1], or laws banning export of dual-use technology for examples of laws that have inherent capabilities - not just the use of the thing- as core considerations.
1. It's illegal to possess a new, automatic weapon with some grandfathering prior to 1986
I think the reason for all the current confusion is that we previously had two very distince groups of "mind" and "mindless"*, and that led to a lot of freedom for everyone to learn a completly different separation hyperplane between the categories, and AI is now far enough into the middle that for some of us it's on one side and for others of us it's on the other.
* and various other pairs that are no longer synonyms but they used to be; so also "person" vs. "thing", though currently only very few actually think of AI as person-like
:-) I like the symmetry of this. If I want to keep my creations outside the hands of others, I can keep them private. I don’t have to publish these words or broadcast them to the world. I could write this on my laptop, save it in a file, and keep it to myself. Fine.
However, once these words are broadcast—once they’re read, and the ideas expressed here enter someone else’s mind—I believe it’s only fair that the person on the receiving end has the right to use, replicate, or create something from them. After all, they lent me their brain—ideas that originated in my mind now live in theirs.
This uses up their mental "meat space," their blood sugar, and their oxygen—resources they provide. So, they have rights too: the right to do as they please with those ideas, including creating any and all data derived from them. Denying them that right feels churlish, as if it isn’t the most natural thing in the world.
(Before people jump on me:- Yes, creators need to be compensated—they deserve to make a living from their work. But this doesn’t extend to their grandchildren. Copyright laws should incentivize creation, not provide luxury for the descendants of the original creator a century later.)
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright.
Copyright isn’t violated when someone consumes a copyrighted work.
Copyright is violated when a copyrighted work is used by someone who isn’t the author to generate profit without prior permission.
You can read a copyrighted book and remember it. You cannot copy it and sell copies. If you want to excerpt it you must give credit and there are limits to what’s considered “fair use”.
Streisand may also be "the more you try to hide something, the more attention it receives", and then by Johnson's Law, the bigger its area of impact becomes.
I'm a daily user of Mastadon. But... People were saying this on newsgroups and gopher, then on message boards, then about Friendster and all of the social platforms that followed. If the platform becomes popular enough to reach some sort of critical mass, then that mass will drag along all of the Facebook/Twitter/Instagram stardom with it. Some people actually like their celebrities and they expect to see those celebrities on their platform of choice. And, inevitably, the marketers will follow.
Yah. Some people like their celebrities, however those celebrities are also now facing competition by other stars which have far greater community outreach, and influence.
Who do the kids of today look up to? Those are your next celebrities.
I'm afraid that's "youtubers". Both big international ones like Pewdiepie, as well as more local (national) ones.
Many of these youtubers are actually somewhat surprised about the size of their following and the fact they can actually make a living with the profits from their channel.
I'm not sure if there's any other place besides youtube where they can monetize their channel in such a successful fashion. They don't really talk about how much one earns as a youtuber, and I suppose it varies wildly. But otherwise, they're not really tied to their channel, just tell the fans where you're heading and they follow.
I live in California, and I travel to Mexico occasionally. It is not uncommon, in my experience, to find vendors selling bottles of water that are simply bottles fished out of the trash and filled with tap water. As a tourist, I try to avoid this scam by drinking liquids that are easier to recognize as genuine. I'm not sure how much this contributes to a general societal influence towards non-water beverages though.
* My country just did something I think is wrong.
* My country is led by people elected by a process that I generally trust but believe is under stress.
* The process or the people have failed and I want to stop this from happening by fixing the process so the people are replaced.
And, now I am stuck on how to do this. There a other actions I can take to help the people of Venezuela, but from a civics perspective, I believe it is my responsibility to partake in a discussion about the systemic failure that lead to this.
I think it is common for Americans to do this because we have a history of at least trying to fix our government because we usually believe we can.